


Rescued Life

by cruisedirector



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Angst, Doomed Timelines, Episode Related, Episode: s05e06 Timeless, F/M, Fantasy, Food, POV Female Character, POV First Person, POV Outsider, Time Travel, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2000-12-31
Updated: 2000-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-05 13:10:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/42085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruisedirector/pseuds/cruisedirector
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A short response to "Timeless" from Tessa's point of view.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rescued Life

**Author's Note:**

> I thought "Timeless" did a reasonably good job with Janeway, Chakotay, and Kim, but a horrific job with Chakotay's gratuitous love interest. She compelled me to remedy that situation.

That's what it comes down to, after I've thrown my life away for him: having sex. Less often than you'd think, Harry. And it's mostly just to keep me happy - since he found out where the ship crashed, I don't think Chakotay feels anything at all when we have sex. I won't call it making love, not any more. What would be the point?

Oh, but it still hurts to hear. Not "They're in love," or even "They care a lot about each other." Just that flip comment - "Theye're a couple, joined at the hip." Said with more than a little resentment, even though they couldn't have done this without me. Yeah.

Oh, Chakotay cares about me, as much as he can care about anyone who didn't die on that ship more than a decade ago. It's typical Harry to be so blunt, especially about me - I know he resents their dependence on me to help with what Harry thinks should be their private salvage mission. And I also know he's a little jealous - I've seen him looking at me sideways when Chakotay wasn't around. Sometimes it's even tempting to see what all that anger disguises.

But Harry's no different than Chakotay. He left his heart somewhere on Voyager. Maybe with the Borg woman he's having the Doctor dissect. Or maybe with his best friend's lover; he hates to talk about B'Elanna, though Chakotay talks about her all the time. She was his second-best friend. Chakotay can't talk about the other one. Not now. Not since Harry made him believe it was possible for him to see her again.

I know where exactly Chakotay left his heart. In her quarters, somewhere between the dining table and the bed he never made it to. I've heard that last supper described to me so many times, just the thought of vegetable biryani makes me nauseous. I know exactly what she said, how she touched him--he made me act it out for him once. He didn't have to tell me, but I also know what he thought for a split second she was going to ask him when he agreed to try the quantum drive and she said, "Speaking of risks..."

He has dozens of illusions like that one. How they almost did it on New Earth. How they almost did it on Lake George. How they almost did it their last night in the Delta Quadrant. Except she never wanted to. Even right here, in the same room as the corpse I'm giving up my history to rescue, I'm tempted to make a joke about how frigid she is.

I'm not a nice girl. But I've come to atone. To give him them their lives back.

I'm standing only a few feet away from him when he touches the computer terminal and he hears her voice. For a moment he looks like he's going to slide the floor and lie among the bodies, lost like the rest of them. But he won't...not in front of me. I may be his lover, but I've never seen him cry over her. He refuses even to look toward her broken body in my presence.

I suggest a tour just to get away from her - and because I want to see his quarters, and hers. To see if those ghosts are still sitting at her table. "Are you with me?" "Always." And he meant it. If she only knew.

Now, he's nervous. Maybe he's realizing that he came back to claim something that was never his in the first place. That he's sending himself back for more pain, more rejection. It's too late for me to feel sorry for him. Has he finally realized what I've prayed for - even screamed in his face - that she's dead, lost to him for decades, while I'm right here next to him? I'm not her. I'll never be her. But I'm here.

God, that sounds trite. But I'm thirty-three years old, and I've wasted some of the best years of my life with a man who's incapable of loving me. I'm not here for entirely unselfish reasons. I want my own life back.

"We don't have to do this," he says.

Oh, yes we do, Chakotay. Or at least, I do.

The killer is that I loved her too. I grew up loving all of them. The first time I read about Voyager, lost in the Delta Quadrant, all alone, I became obsessed. I devoured the Starfleet data banks. I read all the transcripts of the debriefings when the Delta Flyer got back, I wrote a letter to my Senator when Starfleet called off the search. Oddly, I never thought about the survivors at all. I met Chakotay accidentally at the Academy, then pursued him for a year, desperate to hear his stories. Finally he gave in. He wanted to tell them, and nobody else was listening.

When Harry showed up with the plan to save them, how could I not go along? I've wanted to see Voyager for longer than I've wanted Chakotay. I can't even separate out those two desires anymore. Probably never could.

So here we are, committed to violating a law that goes deeper than the Prime Directive: thou shalt not erase the timeline. We're playing God, here. It should be more thrilling than it is. But nothing's thrilled me for a long time, certainly not the way Harry thinks - it's hard to have good sex while you're spending most of your waking hours plotting to wipe your relationship out of existence. The closest I've come to real pleasure in months was when I first held that Borg temporal transceiver. A conduit to the past...to all of them...the hell with being afraid of the Borg Collective or the Department of Temporal Investigations.

I know the paradoxes give most people a headache, but I've never felt that way about time. The river flows in many directions. It has parallel branches and tributaries which dry up, but it always leaves a trace. I remember the time Chakotay dragged me to Southern California because he heard they were rebuilding the boardwalk on Venice Beach and he wanted to reminisce about walking there with you-know-who, even though that happened in a timeline that never happened. Some of Chakotay's greatest moments seem to have happened in timelines that never happened. Yet they made him who he is.

The Challenger's weapons don't scare me. Neither does the fact that the person I am now is going to cease to exist when we succeed. Because I know we'll succeed. She's here with us now, she has always been with him; it's his destiny. I don't resent it anymore.

And they'll always be with me, even if none of them ever hear of me, and nobody ever knows that I'm the real guardian angel who saved them all. It doesn't matter. I'll be saving me, too.


End file.
